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15 February 2013

The US is educating thousands of engineers and scientists, and then making them leave the US because of outdated immigration laws--and yet an op-ed in the New York Times tries to justify this idiotic immigration policy. A cogent response from James Pethokoukis (excerpt below)--

No, America does not have a ‘genius glut’ | AEIdeas: " . . . a New York Times op-ed by the union-backed Economic Policy Institute, “America’s Genius Glut,” ventures into the hysterical when attacking the idea of a tech workers shortage and a new bill that would increase the number of high-skill temporary and permanent visas . . . Some of those high-skill immigrants become entrepreneurs . . . Economist Giovanni Peri:
1. While accounting for only 13 percent of the population, foreign-born individuals account for about one-third of U.S. patented innovations.
2. One-quarter of all U.S.-based Nobel laureates of the past fifty years were foreign born. Immigrants have been founders of 25 percent of new high-tech companies, with more than $1 million in sales in 2006, generating income and employment for the whole country.
3. Over the period 1975–2005, all of the net growth in the number of U.S.- based Ph.D.s was due to foreign-born workers.
4. Currently about half of the Ph.D.s working in science and technology are foreign born. Innovation and technological progress are the engines of economic growth.
5. A high-skill job in a city creates 2.5 additional jobs in the local nontradable sector through linkages of production and local demand effects.
6. An increase in the share of college-educated immigrants by 1% increases productivity and wages for everybody in a city by 1%.
7. Immigrants accounted for well over 50% of the growth in employment in STEM-related fields between 2003 and 2008. . . ."